Haekyung Um Senior Lecturer, Department of Music, Institute of Popular Music, University of Liverpool.

In the past few years, Korean popular music has emerged as a new trendy subject for museum exhibitions. While the first popular music museum in Korea was established in 2014 in Gyeongju, southeast Korea, it was the Korean Wave (Hallyu) exhibition in the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) in London, UK, which initiated this new development. Following the success of the V&A’s Hallyu exhibition in 2022-23, the National Museum of Korean Contemporary History (MUCH) curated an exhibition of the Korean Wave in 2023. The Hallyu exhibitions in the UK and South Korea take contemporary Korean popular culture and music as their key topics. Moreover, both the UK and South Korean Hallyu exhibitions went on global and national tours respectively in 2024. The V&A exhibition (London) to the Fine Arts Museum Boston and the Asian Arts Museum of San Francisco in the USA, and the MUCH exhibition (Seoul) to the Gwangju History and Folk Museum and the Ulsan Museum in South Korea.

Given that the Korean Wave is regarded as South Korea’s soft power strategy (Nye and Kim 2019) and a diplomatic tool (Jang and Paik 2012), the two contrasting Korean Wave exhibitions and their respective exhibition tours are useful case studies. They can help us understand how South Korean popular culture and the associated creative industries are deployed as a tool for cultural and political diplomacy and a soft power generator. More specifically I will focus on how curating and exhibiting Korean popular music contributes to its nation branding, which is often supported by the South Korean government, and how these curatorial and exhibiting processes give shape to the ways Korean popular culture is canonised to represent national, transnational and regional heritages and identities in different museum contexts. Finally, I will discuss what the associated political implications are for the museums, curators and visitors, and for the perception of Korea and the Korean creative industries.

In the past few years, Korean popular music has emerged as a new trendy subject for museum exhibitions. While the first popular music museum in Korea was established in 2014 in Gyeongju, southeast Korea, it was the Korean Wave (Hallyu) exhibition in the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) in London, UK, which initiated this new development. Following the success of the V&A’s Hallyu exhibition in 2022-23, the National Museum of Korean Contemporary History (MUCH) curated an exhibition of the Korean Wave in 2023. The Hallyu exhibitions in the UK and South Korea take contemporary Korean popular culture and music as their key topics. Moreover, both the UK and South Korean Hallyu exhibitions went on global and national tours respectively in 2024. The V&A exhibition (London) to the Fine Arts Museum Boston and the Asian Arts Museum of San Francisco in the USA, and the MUCH exhibition (Seoul) to the Gwangju History and Folk Museum and the Ulsan Museum in South Korea.

Biography:

Dr Haekyung Um is senior lecturer at Department of Music, Institute of Popular Music at the University of Liverpool. She specialises in contemporary Asian performing arts and music industries, focusing on the politics of performance, cultural identity and transnationalism. She has undertaken ethnographic research in South Korea, China, Russia, Central Asia and the UK. She has published on the Korean musical drama pansori, Korean diasporas in China and the former USSR, Indian classical music in the UK, Korean hip-hop and various aspects of Korean traditional and popular genres. She directed a collaborative research project on K-pop fandom in Europe funded by the Korean Foundation for International Cultural Exchange. She was a PI for an ESRC-funded network project, entitled ‘Globalizing South Korean Creativity: Exhibiting and Archiving Hallyu, the Korean Wave’. 

 

For more information, please contact sanne_krogh.groth@kultur.lu.se